Note: If there are other links that people frequent/enjoy/use, please let me know and I'll do my best to keep it updated.

I'm really enjoying the challenge of healing on my holy priest. I've heard numerous complaints about mana/people dying but I have been loving it.

Some observations from my play time:

- Use. My. God. Damn. Lightwell. It's one of our highest Heals per mana, you don't have to lose your target, you can use it while stunned, it has a 20 yard range, and it won't hurt your god damn dps. Use it. I can now mark it with a raid icon and I'll put it where you can easily get to it. Take your eyes away from your Sinister Strike/Steady Shot/Frostbolt/Mind Flay spam and click on it.

- Shadowfiend is your friend. Use it pre-emptively. Don't wait until you're at 10% mana. Don't be afraid to use it on trash either. WotLK habits have been hard to kill and Flash Heals drain your mana quickly. A wonderful tip from Lev: "Combine Hymn of Hope with Shadowfiend. Fiend regens based on your max mana, and Hymn increases this for a period."

- Talk to your tanks and have them let you know when they're out of defensive cooldowns. Guardian Spirit is there to be used and not just for raid boss kill pictures with you popping wings. For five mans, if I'm running low on mana, I'll pop it on the tank and then pop Hymn of Hope to regain some mana while the tank tanks the "killing blow" to proc the heal. Usually gives me enough time to gain some mana back and keep on healing.

- Don't view chakra as a cooldown. Think of it as sustained healing thoroughput. Levantine makes a very good point about NOT macroing chakra into you spells:

"State of Mind is good. Take it. There are some people arguing the use of macroing Chakra to Heal and Prayer of Healing and Mending to maintain 100% uptime without thought. Personally I think this is a horrible idea that saps away any flexibility you had. Just had an unexpected spike of AoE damage and you want to drop a Sanctuary? Too fucking bad, you just autocast Chakra: Serenity because it was macro'd into your heal instead of extending your original Chakra with SoM."

- I still like Spirit of Redemption. I've found it enormously useful in 5 mans. The EJ talent tree doesn't take it and I don't quite understand why (especially when they choose the Renew GCD reducing talent when it's hard to keep blanketing the raid/party with renews. I've found myself in the Heal Chakra state 80-90% of the time. One renew is generally all I need and I don't find the benefit of a 0.5 sec reduction in a spell that I don't seem to cast much).

- Don't poo poo mastery. Echo of Light has turned out to be my 3rd highest heal on recount on many occasions. As Levantine says "Mastery is effectively a Holy Priest's second (third? I'm not sure whether to include Spirit considering it's guaranteed to be on all of my pieces bar trinkets) best stat after reaching the 12.5% minimum haste. Echoes of Light is my favourite of the healing masteries."

I hope this helps some priests out there and hopefully starts some kind of discussion. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

P.S. I will try to make this first post as strealimed as possible since it's my hope this first post can be a jumping off point for our fellow priests. I will incorporate ideas/forums/macros as they come up.

Edit: 12/15/10 - Added quest/ah/easy rep rewards for heroics link

Last edited by thatguy on Mon Dec 20, 2010 7:49 am, edited 6 times in total.

-> Mastery is effectively a Holy Priest's second (third? I'm not sure whether to include Spirit considering it's guaranteed to be on all of my pieces bar trinkets) best stat after reaching the 12.5% minimum haste. Echoes of Light is my favourite of the healing masteries.

-> Combine Hymn of Hope with Shadowfiend. Fiend regens based on your max mana, and Hymn increases this for a period. You can also do this with the Engineering Intellect glove enchant (this versatility is why I rate Engi quite highly on my Priest)

-> State of Mind is good. Take it. There are some people arguing the use of macroing Chakra to Heal and Prayer of Healing and Mending to maintain 100% uptime without thought. Personally I think this is a horrible idea that saps away any flexibility you had. Just had an unexpected spike of AoE damage and you want to drop a Sanctuary? Too fucking bad, you just autocast Chakra: Serenity because it was macro'd into your heal instead of extending your original Chakra with SoM.

Levantine wrote:-> Combine Hymn of Hope with Shadowfiend. Fiend regens based on your max mana, and Hymn increases this for a period. You can also do this with the Engineering Intellect glove enchant (this versatility is why I rate Engi quite highly on my Priest)

Great tip. I admittedly hadn't thought of this. Popping SFiend before heroism will increase the amount of mana gained as well.

As you said Lev, spirit really is something to go after. If you go OOM, get more spirit. Heartsong enchant, spirit food, spirit elixir, spirit everything. Hell, I might pop a cooking fire for some extra spirit.

Also, if you're in a pug and the tank is being stupid and not calling out for CC, speak up and start taking charge. Do not be a quiet wallflower. You might get some pushback but it is a hell of a lot better than a wipe.

GHeal v Flash Heal? I only use flash heal when I know someone will die without a fast heal or when I get a surge of light proc. (Then again, the stupid dpser should have clicked on my Lightwell)

And no, a tank at 40% does not mean he needs a flash heal. GHeal is a big slow mack truck that doesn't cost nearly as much as the sexy ferarri (FHeal). They both get you from Point A to Point B but your mana bar will thank you for using the mack truck.

Learn to triage. Don't waste your PoM on the stupid mage that is standing 45 yards away from the rest of the group. I've been finding group positioning (not only just standing in bad shit) is becoming quite important as well.

Thanks for the tips. My holy priest hit 85 on Monday and I've been running normal Grim Batol with pugs the last couple nights since there's more priest drops there than the other two normals that drop 333 gear. I'm up to avg ilvl 331 so think I'll take a shot at heroics. Out of curiosity, I queued last night to see what the wait time was (was expecting the ~5 min healers had in wotlk on my battlegroup) but was surprised to find that it was instant. I tried a few more times and they all popped up pretty much right away. I did notice more than not were the dreaded "in progress". With that and the horror stories of heroic-fail pugs, it has me worried.

Any tips on easiest heroics? I'm not too worried about the VP for a random one at this point -- just trying to get more gear quickly. Or even if just the first boss is relatively easy (and has priest drop(s)).

Spirit for Holy Priests just received a major buff to Holy Concentration. While some may argue that this diminishes the impact of spirit, I'd argue that it becomes even more important. Not enough to overtake intellect, but the extra spirit will give you more "wiggle" room when things get sticky.

I really don't like crit due to combat ratings conversions being flat out atrocious.

I also don't think you're putting enough weight into mastery. You really aren't overwriting the heals as much as you think. Look at your recount see what Echo of Light is showing up as. I can assure you it's stronger than you think. Crit is a random chance, Echo of Light serves as a constant buffer. I'd take the consistent buffer over a random proc.

Thanks, thatguy. Echo of Light is around 5% of my overall healing last I checked. That's probably back before I had much mastery though. I figured the conversion on crit would be pretty bad, but I noticed one of the meta gems adds 3% to crit heals so wasn't sure. Sounds like int > spirit > mastery > haste (until 12.5%) > crit

12.5% haste shouldn't be a cap and I'm sorry if it came off that way, it should be viewed as a minimum. The 12.5% haste gives your renew a magical extra tick (5 instead of 4). At 37.5% haste, your renew would bump up to 6 ticks instead of 5. You won't be reaching that level for quite some time (if at all this xpac) but the reason I like haste over crit is that it provides some additional insurance on my reaction time.

Aanar wrote:but I noticed one of the meta gems adds 3% to crit heals so wasn't sure.

As for the meta, I would stay away from the 3% crit heals one. I'd go for the Ember Shadowspirit Diamond. While the spirit is nice on the 3% crit one, Ember gives you 54 intellect and 2% maximum mana resulting in more thoroughput and larger mana gains from Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend.

Ahh, thanks. I didn't realize the 12.5% was for an extra renew tick. I've really only been using renew on the tank during chakra heal.

From my testing with curent gear, greater heal seemed better for a patch heal (better hp/mana and hp/sec than renew), so I've been using that when not enough people are hurt for a CoH or PoH. I've been using it more when in Chakra Heal of course since the renew gets refreshed, greatly increasing its hp/mana and hp/sec. I'll have to see if an extra tick would push it to be better than GH even when not in Chakra Heal. That would be great if it is since it has a nice short GCD talented.

Levantine wrote:On a related note, that's why I don't like Surge of Light. I have it and use it, but I don't like it.

I'm in the same boat as you Lev where I have it but I'm having a hard time finding something that is worth taking in its place in order to get down the holy tree. Thoughts?

I don't like Serendipity because I'm finding that I never really seem to need it (and partly because FHeal and Binding Heal are still costing a crapload of mana) and I don't like Rapid Renewal. I'm trying to tell myself that Surge of Light is a (horrid) mana preservation talent but it's not working.

So I went home and regemmed/reforged. I didn't see any reasonable way to get to 12.5% haste from my ~6% so just went with spi>mastery>haste>crit. In starter heroic gear (333)r I think you'd give up too many more important stats to get to 12.5% unless somehow almost all your gear had haste on it. I think my comment from overwriting echo's came from several runs of getting a squishy tank on a tank and spank boss where about all I could do is renew, chakra heal, serendipity and spam greater heal on the tank and leave the dps to either figure out the lightwell or die. Got through the fights, but ugh. So I don't know what you mean by not figuring out "triage". It seems pretty cut and dried that if you're purely tank healing, you're going to overwrite echoes. I'm not super familiar with other healers, but holy priest's seem a little weaker on tank healing than others. Although guardian spirit does help a lot so maybe not.

First try at a heroic last night (GB), tank had barely more hp than me, didn't mark any cc, cycled through targets so dps ended up on different mobs. First wipe I said something like "wtb group that knows how to cc, focus fire, and not pull agro off the tank." Tank leaves group. Dps drop shortly after. Heh. 2nd try I got VP with 3 people in the same guild and one random dps. We wiped several times, but overall it went pretty well I won some nice spi pants. On the 2nd tornado boss, lightwell was actually 2nd on recount. Nice to finally have people that know how to use it. I have been trying to explain it at the start of runs better and it seems to help.

Echoes was almost 11% of my overall healing for the whole run. It was a good confidence builder to complete a run, I was just hoping to get one heroic boss down for the night. Nice thing is on my battlegroup, healers have the instant queue instead of tanks now so its pretty easy to get a new one if RNG gives you a bad one. (Poor dps still have 45 minute waits).

I think it will be easier to reach the 12.5% haste through raid buffs/food/elixirs/etc. If you don't have a ele shammy/boomkin/spriest in your group, you'll be missing 5% haste. That 12.5% haste should really be measured as a raid buffed number in my opinion. Keep that in mind about being so far off from the 12.5% minimum.

That's great to hear about the Lightwell usage and the huge increase in Echo of Light. I think as things go on, Lightwell will become more used and more important.

This seems like a good place to ask this... what do you guys think of the DMC: Blue Dragon (Beasts Deck) for a potential mana regen trinket? Everything I've read so far has said that even throughout TBC and WotLK it was a pretty solid trinket.

Reason I ask, I just recently completed mine (have been collecting the cards since classic... and couldn't post them on the AH individually because they were bugged as having "used charges") and was debating between trying to AH it, or use it.

I see the 2% chance to proc the mana return and bells start going off in my head. Personally, if you're worried about mana regen, I'd rather make it something consistent and something that you can count on having all the time. I personally use thoroughput trinkets and/or trinkets that have an "on use" effect that might help with burst regen or burst healing.

Now, if this is for leveling up, then sure, take it because there aren't that many trinkets out there. But there are a few trinkets that are available via quests or BoE that I would rather have over that one when stepping into a dungeon.

4.06 seems to be bringing some changes. I'm a little saddened about the Prayer of Healing change but my hope is that the Circle of Healing buff will help balance this out. I don't know how our Disc bretheren will cope but I'm sure they'll manage.

The changes to keeping up Renew in Serenity are gladly welcomed as well from this priest.

Not sure how most of this stacks together. Assuming that SH and SC are added together for 30% increased healing, whilst TD is a separate 6% buff. Obviously EoL and Glyph need to be added to the final number separately.

With a typical 8K (raid) spellpower, 15% crit, 4% extra mastery4.03 Prayer of Healing would heal for 13664-14074 (average, inc. glyph)4.06 Prayer of Healing will heal for 12572-12922 (average inc. glyph)So about 8% less as Holy. Or close to 6k less per cast.

8% doesn't seem earthshattering. Add in the substantial buff to CoH, and CoH becomes a higher priority in my mind when you add in the glyph, the smartheal, and not requiring the heal to be limited to groups.

However, with Chakra being one minute long, the value of State of Mind comes down a lot. I'll be dropping a point out of State of Mind to pick up the much needed buffed up Desperate Prayer.

Edit: That's a lie. I'm pulling a point out of SoM and ditching SoR again to pick up Blessed Resilience. Blizzard still has the hardon for raid damage, so it could come in handy on fights like Magmaw and ODS.

I'll probably spec something like this at least till I see whether BR is a decent investment over SoR (rofl) and the second SoM point.